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Ugor and Hughes
Literary Resource Guide for Shakespeare’s Othello
By Pamela Ugor and Selena Hughes
Biography of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is a personality that is so seminal to our cultural identity, as English speaking people, yet there is very little that is truly known about his life. Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. He most likely attended the Stratford grammar school as a young boy. It seems that he was destined to become a sheep farmer or a Glover, the same line of work as his father. Shakespeare married in November of 1582 to Anne Hathaway when he was eighteen, she was twenty-six. Together they had three children: Susanna (1582) and twins Hamnet and Judith (1585). There is a seven year gap in Shakespeare’s life that goes unaccounted for but in 1592 there is record of Shakespeare in London and actively participating in the city’s theatrical scene. His theatrical life comes to a halt in 1592 due to an outbreak of the plague which closes all theaters. During this time it is believed that Shakespeare started writing sonnets and publishing his narrative epics. In 1593 Shakespeare first appears in print with Venus and Adonis. The theaters reopen in 1594 and in the same year he joins Richard Burbage’s theatrical company, The Chamberlain’s Men. In the early 1600, after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, the company changed their name to The King’s Men. Around this time it is believed that Shakespeare published his sonnets and returns to Stratford-upon-Avon. He dies in April 1616.
It is known that Othello was originally staged in the late 1590s and that the major literary source for this play was the Gli Hecatommithi written by Italian poet Giraldi Cinthio. Much of the plot to Othello is taken from this tale. What is original to Shakespeare is the Turkish threat on Cyprus. According to Steven Greenbaltt Shakespeare did take Cinthio’s plot but the language, characterization and the outlook in Othello is original. Leo Africanus’ The History and description of Africa could potentially have been another source from which Shakespeare drew from to create Othello. It is not known for sure if he had read Africanus’ geographical travel log however, the text was in wide circulation before and during the time scholars think Shakespeare wrote Othello. The History and description of Africa was first published in 1550 in Venice and later published in English in 1600 as A geographical Historie of Africa. The tales that Othello tells Desdemona, to woe her, are similar to the depictions and tales in Africanus’ account. It can be supposed that these works help shape Shakespeare’s image of the Moor in Othello that is different from the Moor in his earlier Play Titus Andronicus.
Work Cited
Loomba, Ania. "Chapter 4 Othello Abd the Racial Question." Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 91-111. Print.
Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition Ed Greenblatt, Stephen and Others. [S.l.]: W W Norton And Co, 1997. Print.
Literary Works
For this section we focused on Shakespeare’s works mainly dealing with the themes of race and place (place in the sense of Venice). For complete lists of Shakespeare’s literary works, see The Norton Anthology of Shakespeare.
Sonnets
127-154 The” Dark Lady” Sonnets (1599-1609)
Dramatic Works
The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (1590’s)
The Comical History of The Merchant of Venice, Or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice (1596-1598)
The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice (1603-1604)
The Tempest (1611)
The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra (1603-1607)
Published 1623
Core Texts
Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Race, Cognition, and Emotion: Shakespeare on Film.”
College Literature. 2006. 197-213. Journal article.
Alexander, Catherine M.S. and Stanley Wells. Ed. Shakespeare and Race.
United Kingdom. Cambridge University Press. 2000. Print.
Bartels, Emily. “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance
Refashionings of Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly. 41 (1900): 433-54.
Boyles, David. “Othello, Race, and Cultural Memory on Cheers.”
Popular Culture Review. 11-20. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO.
Web. Spring. 2010.
Donaldson, Peter. “Liz White’s Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 482-95.
Honigmann, E. A. J. The Texts of Othello and Shakespearian Revision. London: Routledge, 1996.
Print.
Jones, Eldred. Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama.
London: Oxford University Press. 1965. Print.
Jones, Nicholas. “A Bogus Hero: Welle’s Othello and the Construction of Race.”
Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship.
Spring. 2005. 9-28. Journal article.
Leggatt, Alexander. “Othello: I took you for that cunning whore of Venice.”
Shakespeare’s Tragedies. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
2005. 114. Print.
Loomba, Ania. ‘Local- Manufacture Made-in-India Othello Fellows’: Issues of Race,
Hybridity, and Location. Post Colonial Shakespeares. Ed. Ania Loomba and
Martin Orkin. London England: Routeledge. 1998. 308. Book article.
Neill, Michael. “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989) 383-412.
Newman, Karen. “’And wash the Ethiop white’: Femininity and the Monstrous in
Othello.” In Shakespeare Reproduced. Ed. Jean A. Howard and Marion
O’Connor. London: Methuen. 1987. 143-62. Book article.
Orkin, Martin. “Othello and the ‘Plain Face’ of Racism.” Shakespeare Quarterly
38 (1987) 166-88.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. Ed. Barbara A Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger
Shakespeare Library. 1993. Print.
Teaching Shakespeare Institute. Shakespeare Set Free. Washington Square Press.
1995. Print.
The Current State of Scholarship and Interpretation
The state of scholarship for Shakespeare’s Othello is lively and varied. One of the earliest references to a performance of Othello occurs in a letter by Henry Jackson (d.1662), of Corpus Christi College Oxford, written in 1610. In this letter Jackson addresses the emotional appeal of the play’s performance. Notable for Jackson was the onstage death of Desdemona that was particularly moving. On the other hand Thomas Rymer dismissed Othello in his work, A Short View if Tragedy (1693), where he expresses a dislike for Shakespeare’s disregard of tragic conventions laid out by Aristotle (Steven Greenblatt comments in his introduction to Othello that this play adheres most to the Aristotelian convention of unity than other Shakespeare plays).The Romantic critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge approached the play from the lens of the ‘sublime’; in which Othello examines the duality of human motives: Othello being honest yet naive and Iago being malignant yet worldly wise. In contemporary literary criticism Othello has been open to study by many theoretical paradigms.
One challenge in the interpretation of Othello is the identity of the title character. The text seems to combine the image of an Arab/Turkish Moor with that of a sub-Saharan African; however, there has been a tendency to depict Othello as one or the other. Contemporary film and stage adaptations favor a darker sub-Saharan look. As civil rights and race relations became a cultural focus Black actors have taken the roll of Othello. Most prominent of these early black actors was Paul Robison who played Othello in a 1943 film. The 2001 update of Othello, “O” (starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett and Julia Stiles) takes up the Shakespeare in high school motif (similar to “10 Things I Hate About You”, “She’s the Man”, and “Romeo + Juliet”). The breadth of criticism and interpretive works on Othello are voluminous. Editions edited by Stephen Greenblatt and material from the Folger Shakespeare library are a great resource for both academic and pedagogical concerns in the Shakespeare literary corpus.
Work Cited
Loomba, Ania. "Chapter 4 Othello Abd the Racial Question." Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 91-111. Print.
McDonald, Russ. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: an Introduction with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. Print.
Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition Ed Greenblatt, Stephen and Others. [S.l.]: W W Norton And Co, 1997. Print.
Rothwell, Kenneth S., and Annabelle Winograd. Shakespeare on Screen: an International Filmography and Videography. New York: Neal-Schuman, 1990. Print.
Summary of Othello
Othello is a play about jealousy and power, in Venice, between Othello – the Venetian general – and his stand-bearer, Iago. The source of Iago’s malevolent motivation is duplicitous. However, he seems to covet the lieutenant potion that belongs of Michael Cassio. While Iago plans to undo Cassio and Othello it is made known that Othello and Desdemona have been secretly married. This causes a small uproar but military events on Cyprus call their attention and the play’s location is moved to Cyprus. Iago first ruins Cassio’s reputation then uses Othello’s unconventional marriage against Othello. Iago frames Desdemona as an unfaithful wife and Cassio as her lover. Amid hearsay and secrecy Iago slowly nurtures doubt in Othello’s mind that reaches a climax when the handkerchief that Othello give to his wife comes up missing. Cassio is again framed by Iago and Othello fully believes that Cassio is having an affair with Desdemona. Othello now plans to have Cassio and Desdemona murdered. As the discord and action whirls up into frenzy – Othello kills Desdemona, Iago kills Roderigo, Iago kills his wife Emilia and Othello kills himself.
Publication information[1]
The first quarto for Othello was published in 1622 and this is considered a scribal copy. The first folio for Othello was published in 1623. The folio is considered to contain Shakespeare’s own revisions while the quarto is believed to be a scribal copy based on the author’s original manuscript. The quarto has fuller stage directions and more than fifty oaths excluded from the folio – probably due to the Profanity Act of 1606.
[1] This information is found in the Norton Shakespeare Anthology edited by Steven Greenblatt. There is also a description of the oaths that are excluded from the folio.